TR Forums

i agree with Speed and cRock about Tyan. i have a Tyan board in my workstation, and it's SO versatile. there are a lot of jumpers, but i view that as an opportunity for more options. i LOVE it!

Tyan may be a little pricey sometimes, but the boards look ahead to the future. i bought my 370 FCPGA in the spring of 2000, put a 366 celery in and then last fall swapped a P-III 866 in. it's great for working on a tight budget, 'cuz you can keep on upgrading without having to go out and buy a new mobo each time.

TYAN TYAN TYAN. no i don't work for them.

Talking only socket 7 and later boards, I started off with a TYAN Tomcat HX chipset P133 board. It was a pretty good board. Later in the super 7 arena I tried the FIC PA-2007, PA-2012, and PA-2013. The PA-2012 was my first ATX board and a terrible buy. I traded it for a VA-503+. I still run the 2007, 2013, and the VA-503+. Later, I got a TYAN Trinity S1598C2 which IMHO is the best of the socket 7 boards. All subsequent boards have been a couple of Abit KA7's and a few KT7's built for friends. They have been pretty good. I did have a KA7-100 burn up in the VR section but Abit replaced it for free, so I'm satisfied. My next board will be a duallie TYAN or MSI.

I guess I'll chime in too.
I've had no problems with Tyan, Abit, Asus, Soyo, or ECS. I did have a Shuttle board that "lost" it's PCI bus but that's been about it.

If I had to choose a "top" brand that I consider first when going to make a new MB purchase, I'd have to go with Abit.

In response to Hellsbellboy, i bought an Aopen AX6BC more than 3 years ago.....never had a problem since day 1.

But i just jumped in the AMD wagon with an Atlon XP1700+ on a Aopen AK77-333 board and since i mounted it in My Antec sx1030, i can start the pc only if i unplug the ac power and disconnect/reconnect the softpower and reset switches from the mobo and replug Ac, then it will start. My power supply is good (if i short pin 14 and ground, it starts)

I was told by my reseller (who owned an Aopen and a ASUS) that Aopen have less problems/returns than ASUS for roughly the same quantity sold.

dan@imprezion wrote:

Trying to find out something puzzling. Why are ECS mobo's so much cheaper than EVERYONE else? Does anyone use them a lot? Any problems with them? Responses please.

ECS typically does not give all the extra features or the OC features. They are no frills and very good at what they do.

I have an ecs k7s5a and it works just fine

I have had 3 good PC's in the last few years, the first was with a Gigabyte mobo GA (something and it ran an AMD 450Mhz CPU, 2 my CD-ROM, Reader, 2 hard drives and all the other bits and I never had a problem at all, not one. I can not recall having a crash and I never upgraded the BIOS either. I sold this lot to a friend who used it until not too long ago, again without problems.

After that I bought an ABIT and used that with no real dificulties except that I could not for the life of me get the ATI Xpert2000 AGP graphics card to work it in without having fatal exceptions all over the place, and the chipset fan needed a drop of oil in it twice to shut the thing up. Apart from those things it was stable and reliable.

Now I have another ABIT and so far, all looks well but time will tell! (funny thing though, the fan, within days began making a racket, I had a replacement off ABIT within 3 days so the backup is good as well). I only built this one about 4 weeks ago so there's a lot of work ahead for the thing yet.

I think choosing any of these is a good, safe option, especially after reading the other posts here, personally I think I will always stick to ABIT, easy to install/set up and reliable enough for me anyway.

Like most, i've built quite a few systems myself. ECS is a good stable board, absolutely no frills though. The pc store i deal with sells about 100 systems a week and its his main choice. I've dealt with FIC/VIA but that was in the SS7 days and VIA chipsets were horrible.

Since then i've had two MSI boards (s2390b) and mine works 90% of the time, the other in my friends system has a bad 2ndary IDE port, and voltage problems (although that is partly attributable to a dirty electircal system in his house)

Eventhough i am an AMD lover, i stick with Intel boards and CPU's when building for companies and not enthusiasts. They are great workhorses and always live up to expectations.